Rachel Saltz

So brava to the heroine, Roop (Alia Bhatt), who finally gets around to asking him, “Why can you never speak plainly?”

For Abhishek Varman, the writer-director, the plain would seem to be the enemy of the good. Everything here is extravagant: the swirling camera moves; the hundreds of color-coordinated dancing extras with stomping heels and jingling ankle bracelets; and the sets, which are some of the most eye-popping this side of Cecil B. DeMille.

The story, too, is maximalist. Set in 1945, the movie takes place near Lahore, with Partition looming. The hero, Zafar (Varun Dhawan) — a Romeo in a league of his own, a song tells us — is a Muslim, who harbors resentments because his parents abandoned him as a child. When not dancing down the street singing (“who cares about riches?”), or riding wild bulls, Zafar, a blacksmith, hammers metal into swords, his gym-toned torso gleaming.

Zafar falls for Roop, but she’s married to Dev, who also has another, more beloved wife. (She’s dying, so she picked a successor.) The unhappy Roop becomes a reporter at the newspaper Dev owns; Zafar becomes her guide to the colorful doings of the disreputable part of town. In Varman’s hands, that neighborhood is as lush as any reputable one, its clean lanes opening into grand havelis with dancing girls inside and lotus-clogged waterways out back.

This kind of fantasy-spectacle is Varman’s forte, not storytelling. When the singing and dancing and action stop, which is less often than you might think, so does “Kalank.” Dialogue scenes can be static, stand-and-deliver affairs. And Varman leaves the actors at sea; when the script calls for character complexity, the result usually reads as incoherence.

Partition, here, is mostly just a looming backdrop. But you still may wonder about the movie’s politics. “Kalank” takes place near Lahore, in what was northwest India and is now Pakistan, so the Hindus, not the Muslims, are the film’s threatened minority. And the disruptive element is a group of Muslims whose anger Zafar has stoked, though for reasons that have nothing to do with politics or religion.

That’s because, in good Bollywood fashion, the personal is mythical more than political — and even the political is mythical. Zafar, though an orphan, isn’t parentless. His mother is a famous Muslim courtesan and singer, his father a Hindu. Roop is a Hindu, too, as is Zafar’s half brother, with whom he unwittingly bonds as fireworks burst in the background. In sum, Zafar is an Indian fellow — who contains multitudes of contradictions. Is there a place for him in the about-to-be Pakistan? In India? In a different movie, these might be burning questions.

‘Kalank’ is not rated. In Hindi, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 46 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/19/movies/kalank-review.html" id="ce5b3db7-40cd-32c4-a50c-c4459fcc598f">The New York Times</a>.

In “Kalank,” a lavish Bollywood melodrama, people talk in mysterious ways. “Some relationships are like debt,” the hero says, gazing into the heroine’s dark eyes. “They cannot be redeemed. They must be repaid.”

'Kalank' Review: A Bollywood Love Story in the Shadow of Partition

To backtrack (lots of spoilers ahead): “Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga” (“How I Felt When I Saw That Girl”), is a romantic comedy, sort of, about a woman named Sweety (Sonam Kapoor) whose suitor, Sahil (Rajkummar Rao), is a failing playwright. Sweety’s not interested in Sahil. For one thing, she barely knows him. She ran into his theater one day to hide from a pursuer and paused long enough to pronounce the play being rehearsed — Sahil’s, of course — shallow on the topic of love. Everyone loves a critic, and Sahil falls hard enough to follow her from Delhi to her home, in Punjab.

Most of the movie’s complicated plot concerns Sahil’s machinations to win Sweety, which include opening an acting school so he can spend a bit of time with her. That’s because she’s under a kind of soft house arrest: Her brother has taken away her cellphone and ripped out her internet, worried that she will shame the family. Why? Is it because she loves a Muslim fellow, as her brother tells their father, Balbir (Anil Kapoor, Sonam’s father in real life) — and who Balbir assumes must be Sahil? No! This is a dodge to hide a scarier secret.

What’s troubling Sweety, who mopes and sighs and tearfully reads old diaries, is something she finally confesses to Sahil: She’s in love with another woman.

Sahil wastes no time being disappointed. Instead, he gets his big idea: to transform a fashion show (Sweety’s dad owns a textile factory) into a musical comedy that preaches tolerance about same-sex love. The stars are none other than Sweety and her girlfriend, Kuhu (Regina Cassandra), who up to this late point in the movie has been seen only briefly in flashbacks.

So, if Sweety’s love dares to speak its name — mostly to worry about its acceptance — her love story has to whisper around the edges of this movie. “Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga,” directed by Shelly Chopra Dhar, isn’t really a romantic comedy in the Bollywood sense — courting, squabbling, wedding. (Although there is a very on-brand song montage with Sweety and Kuhu hugging among ruins.) Instead, like Sahil’s musical, “Ek Ladki” has to give lessons, tackling topics like shame, community acceptance and anxieties about gayness as illness.

Indian movies, especially indie ones, have treated gay themes before. (Not always happily: Fundamentalists burned theaters that were showing Deepa Mehta’s lesbian film “Fire” in 1996.) The first mainstream Bollywood movie to have gay main characters, “Dostana” (2008), was a cheat — the two men, played by big stars, were only pretending to be gay.

In that sense, “Ek Ladki,” the first to put lesbians center stage, is an improvement. No pretending here, even if Kuhu is barely a character and romance only a tiny portion of this movie. (The film’s title may prime audiences for romance, though. It’s also the title of a dreamy hit song from “1942: A Love Story,” a movie that starred ... Anil Kapoor.)

Sahil’s big show ends with much of the audience walking out in disgust. It works, though, for one important person: Sweety’s father, who had rejected her during rehearsals, when he learned that she and Kuhu weren’t just playacting. But he comes around in time to interrupt the performance, delivering the message of love and tolerance that is this movie’s reason to be.

‘Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga’

Directed by Shelly Chopra Dhar. Running time: 2 hours, 1 minute.

With: Sonam Kapoor (Sweety), Rajkummar Rao (Sahil), Anil Kapoor (Balbir) and Regina Cassandra (Kuhu).

“Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga” is not rated. In Hindi, with English subtitles.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/01/movies/how-i-felt-when-i-saw-that-girl-review.html" id="7cc02009-712d-39c5-a136-943061960f0a">The New York Times</a>.

The makers of the Bollywood movie “Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga” have a touching, if slightly demented, belief in the transformative power of art. How to combat ugly stereotypes and entrenched beliefs? Put on a show!

A Lesbian Romantic Comedy, Sort of, by Way of Bollywood

And, yes, Madam has porn. But, surprise: When Egg Muffin and his pals start to watch it, one of them becomes enraged. That’s his mother on screen.

This sets off a chain of mostly comic events that are, by turns, ominous, bloody and cosmic. And that’s just one plot strand. In another, a married woman’s ex-boyfriend dies in her bed, setting off a chain of comic, ominous events. In a third, a little boy pines for his father to return, and the father does — but now transformed into a woman. (Another chain ensues.)

Director Thiagarajan Kumararaja, who also had a hand in the script, takes his time setting all these shaggy, laconic storylines in motion. Part of the movie’s pleasure in its early going is figuring out whether and how they will all merge.

Another pleasure is visual. Colors pop off Kumararaja’s palette (the cinematographers are P.S. Vinod and Nirav Shah), and there’s always something to look at in his Chennai. This isn’t gleaming, ascendant India; it’s the lived-in one, crumbling around the edges, a little romanticized but recognizable in its narrow alleys and concrete stairwells and power outages.

“Super Deluxe,” Kumararaja’s second feature, has been a while in coming after “Aaranya Kaandam” (2010), which was a critic’s darling. No wonder — Kumararaja’s work is stylish and wry, with an indie-cinephile sensibility. (It’s no accident that “Kill Bill” and “Gangs of Wasseypur” posters hang on the DVD store’s wall.)

Part of that sensibility is a frankness about sex that’s still unusual in Indian movies, especially commercial ones. Though nothing explicit is shown, all the storylines in “Super Deluxe” have a little sexual motor, and there’s plenty of frank, off-color language, too.

Kumararaja also elicits some wonderfully deadpan performances from his actors. The teenage boys have a believably nerdy-raffish rapport, and Samantha Akkineni, as the cheating wife, builds a character of unexpected depths.

“Super Deluxe,” though, runs three hours, and Kumararaja loses his way in the draggy, overlong second act. It includes not one, but two drawn-out scenes of threatened rape. (We know the ugly outcome of one, though it happens off camera.)

That these scenes, with their leering Bollywood-ish villain, verge on the cartoonish doesn’t save them. They’re part of a tonal problem — what was mostly delicate and offbeat tips into something cruder and messier. They also serve as a reminder: Cinematic sexual liberation for (and by) men can be punishing for women.

Not rated. In Tamil, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 56 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="7b512093-74e5-4e48-b49a-04c6eaa93b4e" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/movies/super-deluxe-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Super Deluxe' review: A Tamil film, with a cosmic indie vibe

“Got porn, Madam?” That’s what the high school boy known variously as Milk Carton and Egg Muffin asks a DVD store clerk after some stammering feints in the Tamil movie “Super Deluxe.”

<h1>It’s rare for a movie to announce so bluntly and accurately what it’s about and why it exists, but the numbskull Bollywood caper “Total Dhamaal” wastes no time: “It’s all about the money.” These are the first words you hear, sung in English, in an opening musical number so shimmeringly gaudy it would make Las Vegas blush.</h1>

So, yes, the plot involves suitcases full of rupees, coveted and chased by the usual assortment of bumblers, gangsters and civilians. But also, the makers of “Total Dhamaal” needlessly remind us, the movie exists to celebrate and, of course, to make money.

The making part is probably a given. “Total Dhamaal” (“Total Fun”) is the third installment of a popular series, all directed by Indra Kumar, with a simple comic philosophy: No physical gag is too silly or too juvenile; and, repetition can only up the ante.

This time around the guest stars include Madhuri Dixit, one of Hindi cinema’s biggest stars (and best dancers) of the late 1980s and ‘90s, and Anil Kapoor. For long stretches, Dixit is the sole female in “Total Dhamaal” (“Bro,” uttered again and again in English, feels like a verbal tell), and she’s a welcome presence even if the movie drags her down more than she lifts it up.

The shaggy story, a sort of poor cousin to “It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World,” has its big climax in a zoo, where our hapless heroes wind up in their race to grab the cash. They pause to save the animals — a villain ex machina has poisoned their food — and, surprise, a lesson is learned: Kindness trumps greed.

The moral seems as tacked on as the villain. But it’s a sweet thought and not entirely out of keeping with a movie that for all its crassness, comic and commercial, is basically good-spirited.

And practical. One gag, in good Indian metaphysical tradition, has a man drowning in quicksand call for a rope; he’s handed a snake. There’s no perceptual error here, just this thought: Sometimes a snake is just a snake, but it’s not accidental that it can be used to pull a man from danger.

Not rated. In Hindi, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours, 8 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="10426a36-56a0-49dc-806e-575d9f6bd194" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/24/movies/total-dhamaal-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Total Dhamaal' review: A Bollywood caper stoops to amuse

So, yes, the plot involves suitcases full of rupees, coveted and chased by the usual assortment of bumblers, gangsters and civilians.

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Rachel Saltz

Articles written by the author

'Kalank' Review: A Bollywood Love Story in the Shadow of Partition

A Lesbian Romantic Comedy, Sort of, by Way of Bollywood

'Super Deluxe' review: A Tamil film, with a cosmic indie vibe

'Total Dhamaal' review: A Bollywood caper stoops to amuse